The woman in black is waiting for him.
Xanana Gusmão, East Timor's poet-revolutionary and de facto leader, is
working his way through a crowd of admirers. When he reaches her, she
throws her arms around him and sobs uncontrollably on his shoulder. Her
husband and brother were killed by the Indonesian-backed militia last
September, she says, so what should she do with her five children? Gusmão
holds her for an age, all the time talking in a low, soothing voice. Then
he reaches up and gently wipes tears from the woman's face, kisses her on
both cheeks and moves on. The mass of people around him have backed off
and gone silent.

Gusmão's life is full of such religious
moments these days. Minutes later the crowd has raised him on their
shoulders, and Gusmão is pumping them up again with his trademark
rallying cry: "Viiiiva East Timorrrr, Viiiiva Independencia."
They have no food in this village of Padiai in Oecussi district, 175 km
west of the capital, Dili. Most of their houses are still charred ruins
from the militia's rampage six months ago, and all have tales of torture,
rape or murder. But Xanana Gusmão has come to them as a savior and a
healer. After 500 years of Portuguese colonialism followed by the 24 years
of Indonesian occupation that the East Timorese have endured, Gusmão is
promising them freedom from fear--and the crowd is delirious.

When 80% of East Timorese voted for
independence from Indonesia last Aug. 30, many outsiders thought it made
neither political nor economic sense: 850,000 people living on half an
island (Indonesian West Timor occupies the rest), a thousand kilometers
from nowhere. The humiliated Indonesian military did its best to make the
predictions of disaster come true. As they killed, burned and looted all
they could on their way out, they left graffiti on the walls of Dili
promising, A FREE EAST TIMOR WILL EAT STONES. East Timor joined the
world's list of nations at the very bottom: the World Bank estimated per
capita GDP at $240, down among the poorest of the poor along with
Mozambique and Ethiopia.

But something remarkable is happening in
that half of the island. Gusmão, 53, a former guerrilla leader and
political prisoner, has tapped into reserves that are out of reach of the
World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, reserves of willpower and
pride the people themselves barely knew existed. Combining the authority
of Nelson Mandela and the charisma of Che Guevara, Gusmão has been
traveling the country, spreading his vision of the future. "All of us
must let go of the bad things they have done to us," he said in his
first speech after returning to Timor in October, "because the future
is ours." The romance of the revolutionary is irresistible to the
masses, and he gets rock-star adulation wherever he goes. Timorese may be
hungry, but for the first time they are learning to stand on their own
feet. Gusmão in turn draws strength from the crowds that surround him.
"The man is shaping the nation," says Father Filomeno Jacob, a
Jesuit priest in Dili who worked secretly with the resistance from the
1980s. "He believes he is the embodiment of people's hopes."

The cult of Gusmão is not without its
detractors. "Like all humans, there are positive and negative
factors," says Bishop Carlos Belo, Nobel laureate and head of East
Timor's Catholic Church. "He is not 100% savior or hero." The
air around Gusmão is musky with the appeal of the poet-warrior, and some
of his fellow leaders in the National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT),
the umbrella group that campaigned for independence last year, are envious
of the attention he receives.

Others criticize his personalized, highly
emotional approach to politics. "If people saw the way he handles
meetings," says Jose Ramos-Horta, who shared the 1996 Nobel Peace
Prize with Belo and represented the East Timorese cause overseas for 24
years, "he screams and shouts and pounds his fist on the table--but
then he smiles and jokes. He can do it because of his authority."

At the grass roots, this authority is
unchallenged. Last month during the visit of Indonesia's reformist
President Abdurrahman Wahid, an angry crowd gathered to protest the
disappearance of their relatives during the Indonesian occupation. Gusmão
immediately jumped off the podium and plunged into the crowd, arguing,
calming, pleading and reasoning until, single-handedly, he had pacified
several hundred people. Then he led three of the protesters in to meet
Wahid, including the widow of David Alex, a resistance leader who was
captured by Indonesian troops and presumed executed in 1997. "It was
amazing," says Peter Galbraith, former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and
now in charge of politics for the United Nations in East Timor, who was
present at the meeting. "There was this woman, politely asking Wahid
where her husband was buried, and he replied that he would do what he
could--and Xanana sitting beside them, smiling."

Stories about the demonstration and how
Gusmão had turned it into a form of reconciliation quickly spread through
Dili. By nightfall everyone knew how Wahid, charmed by Gusmão, had later
gone on to the Santa Cruz cemetery and apologized on Indonesia's behalf
for "the things that have happened in the past."

Gusmão's background may not contain much
economic theory or public administration know-how. He says he is not
suited to the job of running the country. But his ability to reach out to
people and bring them together is unmatched. In battered, directionless
East Timor, that is the kind of leadership the people need. "This man
knows what suffering is," says Father Jacob. "It is not
theory."

According to his 1994 autobiography East
Timor, One People, One Homeland, Xanana Gusmão was born in Manatuto, 50
km east of Dili "either on the night of the 20th or in the early
hours of the 21st of June, 1946, in the scorching heat that ripens the
rice." East Timor was a harsh place then, still recovering from the
wartime Japanese occupation and laboring under a heavy-handed Portuguese
colonial regime. From his childhood Gusmão remembers the groans of
prisoners being whipped in public, and early on he learned how the
colonials discriminated against those with darker skin.

An unruly pupil, Gusmão was regularly
beaten in elementary school. By the age of 12 when his parents dispatched
him to a seminary to prepare for the priesthood, he says, he was
"already a rebel." After four years of studying with the
priests, Gusmão ran away. He ended up teaching Portuguese at the Chinese
school in Dili and working for the provincial government as a surveyor--a
job that ended when he threatened to punch his boss in an argument over
racial discrimination by the Portuguese overlords.

Burning with resentment at colonial rule,
Gusmão became a journalist in 1974 and watched with satisfaction as the
Portuguese finally decided to leave East Timor. But the following year
Indonesia invaded, and Gusmão joined the resistance. He fled into the
mists of the mountains that run the length of East Timor and would hide
the guerrillas for a quarter of a century. Indonesia's annexation of East
Timor was not recognized by the United Nations and virtually all of its
member countries, with the notable exception of nearby Australia. Some
200,000 Timorese would be killed by the Indonesians, and the occupation
was to be former President Suharto's single biggest foreign policy
liability.

The dangerous, romantic life of the
revolutionary appealed to the bearded young rebel, as he and his men in
the falintil (or Armed Forces for the Liberation of East Timor) resistance
tried to stay one step ahead of Indonesian troops. "Sometimes in the
mountains a lot of people died, suffered--but we never forgot to
sing," he says. "Music for us means many things, but most often
it expresses sorrow." In 1975 Gusmão had given up his family,
including a wife and two young children: from then on, the struggle for
East Timor would fill his life.

Back in Dili, his family was harassed by
Indonesian intelligence. "I felt very scared," says his mother,
Antonia, now 77. "Sometimes they would come and say he was dead. All
I could do was go to church and pray for him." Occasionally
intermediaries would smuggle letters to her from her son. She would
memorize them quickly and burn them. The Indonesians tried to pressure
Gusmão's father, Manuel, to persuade his son to surrender. He told them,
"A lion is a wild animal, but he never eats his own." They gave
up. By 1981 Gusmão had become the leader of the armed resistance and the
most wanted man of the Indonesian special forces. But the steep mountains
covered in thick foliage were perfect cover for the guerrillas. It was not
until 1992 when Gusmão was on a secret trip to Dili to liaise with the
urban underground that he was betrayed by a friend and arrested by the
Indonesians.

It may have been the best thing that
happened to him. Not only was Gusmão sick from living in the mountains,
with their dengue and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. He was also isolated
from the outside world. Now he had a platform. At his trial in Dili he
used his defense statement to call for a vote on East Timor's future:
"Whoever is afraid of the referendum is afraid of the truth." He
was sent to Jakarta and quickly became one of the world's most prominent
political prisoners, and the campaign to get Indonesia to withdraw from
East Timor began to attract attention internationally. Nelson Mandela
visited him in 1997 and called for his release. "When I was in
Cipinang jail, we started making contact with the pro-democracy
movement," Gusmão recalls. "Our independence was not something
we could force, but we could perceive it as coming." Although the
guards monitored his mail, his sister Armandina sent him Christian prayer
cards with key words underlined to spell out secret messages. He replied
in kind. To pass the time he wrote poetry and painted from memory the
landscapes of East Timor he could not see from his cell.

With the downfall of Suharto in 1998, the
new government in Jakarta began talking seriously about some form of
autonomy for East Timor. Gusmão himself would have accepted that, had not
President B.J. Habibie surprised everyone--particularly his own
military--by taking up Gusmão's challenge from six years before of a
referendum on full independence. The Indonesian military felt betrayed by
Habibie, and they armed and trained militia groups in East Timor to
terrorize the population against voting for independence. Gusmão was
confident the elections would go his way, but he then faced one of the
most difficult decisions of his life. Still nominally head of the falintil
resistance guerrillas, he had to give the order for them not to intervene
in the massacres that followed the elections.

"Of course it was very difficult,
knowing that our people were being killed," he says now. "But we
knew the strategy of the Indonesian generals, and we wanted to avoid
falling into their trap. They wanted to show East Timorese were fighting
each other, so no U.N. intervention would have come." As the killings
and burnings by Indonesian-backed militias went on in the early days of
September, falintil guerrillas were watching from the slopes over
Dili--but they obeyed orders and did not intervene. Three weeks after the
independence vote, an Australian-led force sanctioned by the U.N. landed
in East Timor to reestablish order and security. One month later Gusmão
himself, newly released from house arrest by the Indonesians, arrived back
in his homeland. In his first speech in Dili, he had tears in his eyes as
he told the crowd: "We knew we would suffer, but we are still
here."

Gusmão now works in uneasy alliance with
the U.N., which has been criticized by many Timorese as hopelessly slow in
delivering economic aid. Six months after the burning of Dili, the
majority of the buildings are still without roofs for lack of construction
materials. The problems in starting a country from scratch are
mindboggling: everything is up for grabs. An initial proposal to use the
Portuguese escudo as the currency has been scrapped in favor of the U.S.
dollar. Gusmão is still holding out for Portuguese as the official
language, although many in the younger generation think English would be
more appropriate. An international country code--670--has been approved
for East Timor's telephones, though this is still academic since most
phone lines were ripped out by the Indonesians last September.

But the single biggest issue will be the
political transition--at the moment the U.N. is legally the holder of East
Timor's sovereignty, the first time in its history the world body has
played such a role. So far no date has been set for elections for the
presidency, although the chief of UNTAET (U.N. Transitional Authority in
East Timor), Sergio de Mello, says he favors elections by the summer of
next year. Gusmão has said repeatedly he does not want to be president.
"Our struggle is not for us, but for the young people. Independence
needs more capacity than I have."

Gusmão's aides and family believe he
really does not want the power. After 25 years of struggle, says his
sister Armandina, "he has done a lot for East Timor. As a human he
needs to rest." But in East Timor today, Gusmão is more than a
human--he has become an icon of a new freedom, bitterly won and still
fragile and unsure of itself. The brains, the technical skills for
reconstruction--Timorese can get these from elsewhere. Gusmão is their
heart, and now, more than ever, they need him to keep beating strongly.

With reporting by Jason Tedjasukmana/Dili

TIME Asia March 20, 2000 -Cover Story-

E A S T T I M O R ' S R E C O N S T R U C
T I O N

Is Aid Doing More Harm Than Good?

By JASON TEDJASUKMANA Dili

Full of hope: East Timor's economic
future depends in part on the skills of its fishermen. John Stanmeyer/Saba
for TIME

The spirits of East Timorese may have
revived, but restoring life to their economy may take longer. Nearly 80%
of the population is unemployed. So far, the territory's only private
businesses--a few bakeries, restaurants, hotels and rental companies--have
been opened by foreigners attracted by low costs. Electricity and water
are free, and save for a controversial tax on coffee exports, no
regulations have been set up to cover taxation, investment and workers'
compensation.

East Timorese themselves face limited
options. An agreement signed last week by the United Nations and Australia
to recover oil and gas from the Timor Sea promises to generate millions of
dollars in foreign exchange. But production won't begin before 2004. In
the meantime, East Timorese leaders and World Bank officials are pinning
their near-term hopes on agriculture and fishing. Mild weather and
seasonal rains should ensure that this year's harvest of coffee, at nearly
8,000 tons, will be as good as if not better than previous years'--good
news for the one-quarter of the population who depend on the territory's
key export. Successful harvests of vanilla, rice, corn, soybean, cassava
and sandalwood are also expected to bring in desperately needed foreign
exchange and ensure food self-sufficiency. "Agriculture will lead
economic growth for some time," says Sara Cliffe, the World Bank's
chief of mission for East Timor.

Locals, however, expected more from the
millions in international aid promised after the territory voted for
independence last August. The armored personnel carriers brought in by
Australian-led peacekeepers have torn up East Timor's already poor roads.
Rural areas, still subject to blackouts and shortages of water, complain
that reconstruction funds have mainly been directed toward the capital,
Dili. "All of this money is being poured in, but it's not being
distributed properly," says aid worker Galu Wandita. Towns like Gleno,
Suai and Oecussi have been so devastated that aid workers privately
question whether the $520 million pledged by donors in December will even
begin to cover the most basic requirements of sanitation, housing and
education.

More worrisome, local resentment has
begun to build over the dominant role being played by outsiders in the
rebuilding process. Former colonial overlord Portugal has set up postal
services, while Australia is providing a mobile phone network. Both have
opened banks in Dili, the only two branches operating in the territory.
Four currencies--the Indonesian rupiah, Portuguese escudo, Australian
dollar and U.S. dollar--are in circulation, baffling local traders trying
to keep up with daily exchange rate fluctuations. The U.S. dollar won out
over the escudo as the territory's official currency, yet only a select
group of Timorese working for the U.N. earn their pay in dollars.

Timorese leaders acknowledge the need for
the expertise of foreign administrators and engineers. But they warn that
the international mission will fail unless more Timorese are recruited.
"We are grateful for the presence of the international community, but
give East Timorese an opportunity to be involved in the
decision-making," says Dili's Bishop Carlos Belo. "Otherwise the
U.N. will leave East Timor with the same problems as before."
Outsiders may be in control, but it is time to let the Timorese take
charge of their fate.

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